The present invention relates in general to motor vehicles and in particular to seals used in components which may be employed in such vehicles.
A truly effective gastight seal between relatively movable bodies is of decisive important in many fields of technology, including the construction of motor vehicles and their components.
Reliable gastight seals between two relatively movable bodies have, of course, long been known, as witness the seals between the cylinder and piston of reciprocating piston engines which are widely used to power vehicles of various kinds. However, the sealing problems become much more complicated when a seal is required between three relatively movable bodies as is the case, for example, in rotary piston engines where the bodies which together bound the operating space never to come to a complete standstill relative to one another during engine operation (unlike the top-dead-center and bottom-dead-center position of reciprocating engines).
The most widely known rotary-piston internal combustion engine is the so-called "Wankel" engine. In this construction the sealing problems inherent in a rotary piston engine were solved by limiting the number of relatively rotatable bodies to two, i.e. the tri-lobal rotor and the housing. Sealing is effected by providing the tip of each rotor lobe with a groove extending parallel to the axis of rotation and installing in each groove a sealing strip which is in constant sealing engagement with the inner surface of the housing. An arcuate groove is formed at each rotor end face and sealing strips in these grooves connect with the sealing strips at the tips of the lobes.
However, rotary piston engines are known which, owing to their special construction, are in principle superior to the Wankel engine, These machines have not, heretofore, been able to gain acceptance because they operate with three relatively movable bodies and no reliable way has existed until now to provide a proper gastight seal between these bodies.